Success! New Horizons Completes Its Pluto Flyby

Breathe easy, folks. You did it.

After nine and a half years of waiting, the New Horizons team had to wait about 13 more hours for the New Horizons craft to phone home and say that it had completed its Pluto flyby. It finally did, with the message being received on the Canberra dish of the Deep Space Network at 8:52:37 PM ET Eastern Tuesday night.

There was a small chance – something like 1 in 10,000 – that New Horizons would collide with some leftover debris in the area near Pluto and be unable to complete the mission. Initial scans suggested that nothing was there to cause concern, and thankfully, those were right.

Now comes the wait for the data. SeePlutoNow.com, which formerly hosted a countdown to New Horizons' closest approach, now has a counter ticking away the 475 days until the last of the spacecraft's16 GB of data makes it to Earth. In the meantime, there will be a slow (1 kilobyte per second) data transmission from the craft back to our planet. The first images aren't expected until 3 PM Eastern Wednesday afternoon, when NASA will host a press conference to release. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, watch NASA's 9:30 PM Eastern update on the health and status of the mission. An embed is below, or visit NASA TV.